Why are the quarks so named? Quarks have a variety of names (or flavours):


*

*Up

*Down

*Strange

*Charm

*Bottom or Beauty

*Top or Truth
Why do they have such odd names?
 A: The up/down top/bottom should be self evident: in a matrix representation the vector is written that way
+1/2>
-1/2>
So in the isotopic spin space   (the SU(2) of the SU(2)xSU(3)xU(1) of the Standard Model) according to the charge the one on top was called the up and the one on bottom, the down.
The strange got its name from the strange mesons, which when discovered were behaving strangely, with respect to pions, needing a new quantum number because they were generated in pairs ( Lamda K) and the quantum number became the "strange" one.
Charm was a whim  as , they were charmed by its existence since it had been predicted to exist given the quark model expectations; from the quark entry in wikipedia:

Glashow, who coproposed charm quark with Bjorken, is quoted as saying, "We called our construct the 'charmed quark', for we were fascinated and pleased by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world

Top and Bottom, again because of the position in the vector, and Beauty instead of Bottom out of whimsy again, keeping the B, and Truth keeping the T.
Who said that physicists are not having fun?
For completeness, the name "quark" has the origin in Finnegan's Wake of James Joyce:

For some time, Gell-Mann was undecided on an actual spelling for the term he intended to coin, until he found the word quark in James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake:
Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Of course our Germanic language friends say that Quark is a type of cheese!
Actually the quark article in wikipedia has an etymology section for the quarks, to be read for completeness.
